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MAGAZINES STILL EXIST

Perhaps I'm the only person on Earth who still reads magazines. I also still talk on phones. Although I made my phone out of a rock, like Fred Flinstone. Stone Age.

Anyway--

So I still read magazines, but they are often so disappointing. The evidenc:

Marie Claire:

I wasn't aware we are still paying attention now that the "Twilight" movies are over. It's so boring, she can barely keep her own eyes open just thinking about herself as the cover story. I agree.

But I'm not the target demographic so I'll move on.

On to a legitimate issue. Here is the "fashion issue" for Details, featuring the biggest models of today. I have complained to the universe many times about the lack of racial diversity in American media, particularly the fashion industry--which theoretically inspires our idea of how we should look--as if we Americans are too stupid to comprehend "beauty" as anything other than a white face. Granted, some of these models are Latino, but the effect is still the same. Racism in the media is so common, we have become desensitized to it and don't really react to it anymore.

When I was with a modeling agency, our composite cards were held in bins on the wall; there was a section of the wall devoted to "ethnics," meaning anyone who wasn't white. So if you wanted someone who didn't look white, you had to go over to the corner and specifically pull those cards. It was ridiculous. And every agency was like that.

Speaing of racism in American media,

My friend pointed this out to me. You have to read the article to understand the angle, and here you have to log in, so I'll sum it up: it's about a high school in the South Side of Chicago that has partnered with IBM to promise a job to anyone who graduates, but their school runs for 6 years, with 4 years of high school and 2 years of college. Pretty cool. Here's my issue: the South Side of Chicago is a mostly-black neighborhood. It even says in the article, the high school is an almost all-black school. Yet they put a white guy on the cover.

Does it really make that big of a difference in sales that they can't put a black student on the cover of their magazine? Are the readers of Time really this racist? Or maybe it's just the editor? Although there are almost no ads in Time anymore anyway, since advertisers don't want to throw away their money anymore on a magazine that almost nobody reads, so it doesn't matter much.

Because of the whole racism-in-fashion-is-getting-worse, I'm so glad that a dark-skinned Kenyan woman with natural hair is the red-carpet darling of this awards season. The fact that Lupita Nyong'o actually makes iffy outfits look better is apparently not lost on the fashion oligarchy. She even sat next to Anna Wintour at the Calvin Klein F/W 2014 show--between Naomi Watts & Ms. Wintour, in fact.

So I'm Team Nyong'o. May she kill it on red carpets & magazine covers for years to come.